Divide and Conquer | The benefits of spreading your content across multiple platforms

Content marketing is a great way to give your brand reach, relatability and credibility. But, you need to make sure your clients, customers or consumers are seeing it.

The simplest way to reach people on a wider scale is to post the same content in a different way on multiple platforms. This is beneficial, because if someone is swinging between platforms with their mood, they'll still see it. You can post the same product, post or ad on every platform, just not in the same way. Each platform does require a different approach, whether that is an image or text based post and the accompanying strategy you use for your business.

Your website should host a mix of everything and link to every social media platform and anything external to your website that your business does. There's not much point in having a Snapchat account if you don't show it anywhere, for example. There’s no way for people to discover you on there, so if you don’t show it off on your site, no one can watch your story. But also, there’s no need to spend so much time on something that will whiz by in your consumers’ feed and then be gone forever. So show it off. Add a blog post, or a photo to your portfolio. Imagine if someone didn't like Instagram or Facebook, but went on your website regularly to see what you've been up to. Or if they only used Pinterest, but no other channels. You can also create a regular email newsletter that sends links to your best recent content to your reader’s inbox. This is a way that businesses can reach their most loyal consumers since an algorithm can’t affect anyone’s inbox. It also helps to reach your consumer at the best time for them, so if they see multiple links to the same item on multiple channels, it won’t hurt.

Photo by Igor Miske

If you're an in person brand, like a physical store, capitalize on that whenever possible. No one can take personal relationships you and your staff have with your clients or customers away. Treasure those moments, add any humanity into business processes whenever you can, even if it is a popup on the screen at the counter, or an engrained conversation starter for your staff to action. You don’t need a script, just empower your staff to chat to your customers. Let them know its expected of them and that they can prioritise it whenever they can. The same strategy can be used on the phone, by email and any contact you have digitally, the main difference is that the person you communicate with can’t see your face.

A platform you don't own can change at any moment. A social media platform could lose popularity at the drop of a hat. Think Bebo or MySpace. Or the platform could change its algorithm just because they feel like it. Instagram did this earlier this year with their change from showing you photos in chronological order to showing you your favourite accounts regardless of when they posted since you last looked at your feed. There was an outcry from people who were worried their followers would never see their content. While it hasn’t effected them as much as they had originally thought, there was a period of scrambling to change strategies for many businesses around the world. The introduction of Business Profiles also had people second guessing whether that would effect them in the algorithm. Facebook makes changes every other day and doesn’t announce the majority of them so only by tracking your reach and engagement can you realise when things have changed. If you have your eggs in lots of different baskets, an algorithm change like this is never as much of a concern.

By spreading your content, products, promotions and interactions across multiple channels, you spread your brand further, decrease the risk to your business if a social media platform changes and tailor your content to reach people on a wider scale.